A couple of weeks ago I got a virus. Not a physical virus, a computer virus. One of those that doesn’t really do any damage, it just irritates you. This one kept popping windows open on my computer, saying things like ‘WARNING! YOUR INFECTED!’

It’s hard to build up any real hate toward a virus like that. The ones that wipe out your hard drive and cause your underwear to ride up, sure, those are really bad. I advocate life in prison for anyone who starts one of those. But when a virus can’t even tell the difference between your and you’re, it’s hard to take it seriously.

Plus, this virus, besides informing me I had a virus, offered to fix itself. Not for free, of course. But you know you’re being had when the same window that tells you you have a virus also tells you how to get rid of it, for the mere price of $60. All major credit cards accepted.

The virus wasn’t difficult to eradicate. I just downloaded a couple of free files from my wife’s computer onto a jump drive, plugged them into my computer, and sicced them on the little irritant. So it was much easier to fix than most of our problems.

Take, for example, the global warming thing. It struck me, while I was waiting for the good files to chase down the bad files in my computer, that my virus was a lot like the whole sordid scam we’re being fed by the Chicken Littles. But that one just doesn’t seem to be going away.

You remember, I’m sure, the climate change summit conference held in Copenhagen, Denmark about a year ago. The one that created a whole bunch of pollution, what with getting all the delegates there from all over the world, and overloading the entire country’s limousine capacity, and was, in the end, a complete and utter failure. I’m being nice here, of course. It was far worse than a failure, but I can’t think of something to say about it that would accurately describe the level of total failuredom that conference achieved.

Well. You would think that if those delegates were honestly interested in improving the world, if they really cared about carbon emissions, if they had what my granddad would call ‘a lick of sense,’ they would just throw in the towel right there. If they were intelligent, sane, forthright human beings they would look at each other and say, "You know what? This isn’t working. We’re causing hundreds of times as much pollution as we would be stopping, even if we could all agree on anything, such as the color our tablecloths should be. And we can’t agree on anything, anyway. What we should do is just stay home, and instead of making things a lot worse, we’ll at least not be irritating the people who actually do productive work in the world, such as plumbers."

But they don’t say that, because they got a free trip to Copenhagen out of the deal. And these people are crafty. They can’t be called intelligent, or honest, or useful, but they’re not stupid. When they looked at each other after accomplishing absolutely nothing at the end of the Copenhagen conference, they said, "You know what? We failed here. We really didn’t get a thing done. What we should do is have another conference next year, and invite even more worthless people to it, so we can cause even more pollution. And we should have it in Cancun, where the weather will at least be nice and we can sip Pina Coladas while we’re spending other peoples’ money to do nothing."

So that’s what they did. This year’s Climate Change Conference was held in Cancun, Mexico. Delegates came from all over the world, and met for almost two weeks. And in the end the Cancun conference was far more successful than the Copenhagen conference. The delegates, finally, agreed that the weather was much nicer in Cancun than it had been in Copenhagen. They figured that out by watching the ice melt in their cocktails. That was all they agreed on, but I guess that’s something.

But my point, which you’ve forgotten, was that the whole climate change thing is very much like my computer virus. If you go to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change website, there’s a little video type thing running on the home page, which shows a butterfly flying around, and it says, "The beacon of hope has been reignited."

What that means is that the delegates hope to meet again next year, perhaps in Cozumel, and again accomplish absolutely nothing toward the problem of climate change, and they hope to spend your money to do it. Which is not really a problem for them, since they know climate change is a natural thing, and humans aren’t causing it, and there’s nothing we can do about it, except have a bangin’ time in Cozumel.

Just like my virus, the whole climate change problem is bogus. And just like my virus, the answer to the problem is money. And the only way to keep the money rolling in is to keep people believing there’s still a problem.

Me, I’m a volunteer firefighter. You let me get close enough to that invented beacon of hope, I can put it out. And if you’re wondering, yes, I’m free to go to Cozumel next year . . .

Kendal Hemphill is an outdoor humor columnist and public speaker who believes in the kind of climate change caused by the thermostat on the wall. Write to him at PO Box 1600, Mason, Tx 76856 or jeep@verizon.net

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